Month: February 2014

Spring 2014 Course Offerings

MUS 358: Music in World Cultures
TR 8:30-9:50 AM    Room: CLS 250 + Discussion Section

Beyond humanly organized sound, music is a tool to think with. The different ways in which humans use and talk about music can teach us much about each other. In this class, we will examine music-related practices from cultures associated with three different regions of the world (West Africa, China, Hispanic Caribbean). You will learn how people raised in these cultures produce and perceive these musics as well as what concepts scholars have developed to understand these expressions more generally. Beyond exposing you to musics that you may not be familiar with, my goal is for you to apply the concepts you learn here to think critically about the multiple cultural performances you experience in your own lives. This course fulfills the IC (International Cultures) Multicultural Requirement.

Selected Texts Include:

Lau, Frederick. 2008. Music in China. Oxford University Press: New York.
Moore, Robin. 2010. Music in the Hispanic Caribbean. Oxford University Press: New York.
Stone, Ruth. 2005. Music in West Africa. Oxford University Press: New York.

MUS 407/507: Ethnographic Techniques for Music-Dance
M 2:00-4:30 PM     Room: Collier House 103

EdAtWork

Doing fieldwork has long been considered one of the defining characteristics of ethnomusicology, although where “the field” is and how a researcher represents it has changed over time. This class takes a “nuts-and-bolts” approach to ethnography, with special emphasis on the issues that arise when one’s focus is expressions of music and dance. Each class meeting will be divided into two parts: the first part being a discussion of certain ethnographic issues; the second a workshop on practical skills or a group activity. While the class is taught from an ethnomusicological perspective, students in a number of disciplines will find learning about techniques like interviewing, transcription, writing and coding field notes, and representing culture through multimedia useful. Graduate students participating in the class will be assigned additional readings, class preps, and more intensive writing projects.

Selected texts include:

Murchison, Julian. 2009. Ethnography Essentials: Designing, Conducting, and Presenting Your Research. Wiley.
Seeger, Anthony. 2004. Why Suya Sing: A Musical Anthropolgy of an Amazonian People. University of Illinois Press.

Winter 2014 Course Descriptions

MUS 407/507: Racial Ideologies in Latin American Music and Dance
MW 10:00-11:50 AM Room: GER 303   Instructor: Juan Eduardo Wolf

Time and time again, Latin American music and dance is described as the result of the mixing of three cultures: the African, European, and Native American. This perspective, however, oversimplifies the complex ways ideas about race, music, and dance developed during Latin America’s colonial era and how they continue to interact today. In this class, we will read about the ways in which racial ideologies shaped the musics that now represent various Latin American nations. We will discuss how certain instruments (charangos, drums, harps) and expressions (candombe, samba, tango, wayno, yaravi)  associated with Blackness and Indianness were symbolically appropriated and what impact those appropriations had on how people saw and continue to understand race. Graduate students participating in the class will be assigned additional readings, class preps, and more intensive writing projects.

Selected Texts Include:

Andrews, George Reid. 2010. Blackness in the White Nation: a History of Afro-Uruguay. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Chasteen, John Charles. 2004. National Rhythms, African Roots: the Deep History of Latin American Popular Dance. Alberquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Mendoza, Zoila. 2008. Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru. Durham: Duke University Press